Dark Doorways (10 page)

“Let me just take him to the
ER. There’s a hospital just a block away. Will you watch Gabi?”

“Of course. But– I
mean, you don’t mind doing that for him?”
For me?

Swanson’s careful smile, the
one that was much faster to appear with Gabi, might have broken my heart any
other day, if I hadn’t still had Mom’s jasmine clouding my rational thoughts.

“He was my student. So of
course I care. He’s also–” The arm waving began, the lecturing kind, the
reverting-to-his-academic-self-to-avoid-emotion kind. “You know. Your
boyfriend.” So maybe he was still adjusting to this shift in our relationship,
and maybe I was learning that it might still take some time before we found any
normalcy as father and daughter.

Placing one of Michael’s arms
over his own shoulders, Swanson helped Michael up the steps to street level
where they disappeared toward St. Mary’s. Gabi placed her hand in mine,
comforting me incidentally. In the moments there, on the river’s edge, her
treasure map had somehow found its way back to us, to flitter back onto Gabi’s
little arm.

I didn’t want to discuss the
map, why it flew or why it kept breaking glass just when I needed it to. I just
wanted my mom.

Hand in hand, we took the El
back to Evanston, where we eventually got off and walked the few blocks over to
Swanson’s house. Traveling with a three-year-old, even just those few miles,
began to erode my efforts at staying composed. I could be with Michael. I could
be home, crying into my bed sheets. But instead I was hearing about how Mr. Pig
got married to Elsa the Elephant.

“You have the key, Gabi?”

“No!” The
no
was so
bouncy and spirited that I’m sure speakers of other languages would have been
certain that she had answered in the affirmative.

“Well, we can wait. Or we can
go to my apartment, I guess.”

“Qué será, será. Whatever
will be, will be...” Gabi was singing so quietly that the song almost went
unnoticed. The treasure map flew out of her pocket and into the lock,
unlatching the door in seconds. And I could only stare at Gabi.

“Gabi, how do you know that
song?”

“Your mom’s song? She was
singing it as you fell out of the boat.”

“You– She–
What?
”

“Come on! We can have
spaghetti.”

I followed Gabi as she waved
me in, speechless in the self-opening doorway. “Gabi, what do you mean, my mom
was singing it on the boat?”

“When you fell out! I heard
it.”

“Did you hear anything else?”
A way to get her back perhaps?

Gabi shook her head no as she
ran up to her bedroom. My head was swimming, and for the first time that
afternoon, I wondered if
I
should have been the one in the ER. Deciding
that all I needed was to clear my thoughts, I made a cup of chamomile for
myself. It was the blowing on the hot liquid, so I wouldn’t burn myself, that
convinced me I should probably check on Gabi, but only after checking the lock
on the door a dozen more times before hiking up the stairwell.

“What are you playing?” I
never knew what to ask kids. Maybe this question would let her guide the
conversation.

“These Barbies are you and
your mom. And this box is the boat.”  

“Oh?” It was a challenge to
hide the chills going down my spine. Just when I was beginning to tell myself
that it was all a bad dream, Gabi pinched me back to reality, through Barbies
no less. “And where’s Michael?”

“He wasn’t supposed to be
there.”

“Really. Hm.”

“Eliza tried a lot of things
didn’t she?”

“You know Eliza?” The
enigma-child was a well of surprises, surprises masked by cute cheeks and
blonde ringlets.

“I know she wanted to stop
the boat from crossing. She thought you would stop it.”

“What?” I sat down on her
plush carpet, displacing the princess Barbie who had blue marker on her lips
and, apparently, no eyebrows.

Gabi reenacted the entire
scene, her hand pulling Barbie-me onto the boat then waiting a few seconds to
reunite Barbie-me with Barbie-Mom.

“How do you know everything
that happened? I mean, you weren’t there. Michael was the only one there with
me.”

“You’re Será. You’re the one
who makes them leave.”

“Makes who leave?”
And
leave to where?

Gabi walked over to her
closet, where a cardboard toy bin sat on the floor that she could access
easily. I expected to redirect her back to our conversation; I didn’t expect
her to pull out a wounded doll. The Barbie’s broken neck snapped back together
quite disagreeably, as if there had never been a neck there. The knotted hair
and threadbare clothing finally gave her away. There was only person the doll
could be.

“Eliza,” I whispered.

The soulless Barbie-Eliza
pulled others with her onto the boat. They were all misfits, unfit for Barbie’s
perfect world of shopping, grooming, and dates with Ken. Some weren’t even
Barbies.

They all entered the boat
just seconds before Barbie-Mom threw Barbie-me over the boat. Making chugging
noises that I imagined she made with her bath toys, Gabi pushed the boat along
her toy table until it fell off the edge, crashing very unremarkably to the
carpeted floor. She looked up at me, beaming.

“I don’t understand.” It was
my first conversation with Swanson all over again, him explaining his research
and me not having any clue. To be fair, that was my first week of grad school.
What defense did I have against not comprehending a three-year-old?

Her sweet little hands picked
up the Barbie-Eliza, brining it over to face me. “She thought that if you were
on the boat, it would stay.”

“Stay? Like stay on the
river?”

Gabi showed me where the
doll’s neck had snapped apart. “She died a long time ago. She didn’t get on the
boat when she was supposed to.”

Ah.

“And my mom? Did she also
not
get on the boat when she was supposed to?”

Gabi shrugged, untroubled by
the fact that my mom had waited over a year to– to what? Cross over? What
lexicon does one use for a situation like this?

“She was on the boat.” It was
a simple response. Straightforward. The kind of thing I had come to expect from
Gabi. She got that from her dad.

Of course Mom was on the
boat. That’s what matters. I couldn’t change anything, and maybe I wasn’t
supposed to. Mom could have jumped out with me, but stayed. She stayed on that
boat and crossed under the seventh bridge without me.

“And you can buy your old
house, right?”

“What? You mean my mom’s
house?”

Gabi, humming happily as if
we were having tea with Mr. Pig and his new bride, as if we weren’t reenacting
my mom’s crossing, went over to pick through the boat’s wreckage. A mutilated
Ken doll appeared, which she excitedly shoved into my hands.

“Receding Hair Line Parker.”
I had wondered about this man who had desecrated Mom’s house.

It took me a few moments of
silence, moments of staring at the Ken doll, to fully connect all the pieces.
He was one of them. Eliza was one of them. Who else? How long had Mom been
running from them?

“She was running away from
them. I need my mom back. Maybe I can still find that boat. Do you think it’s
somewhere on the Chicago River still?”

Gabi had moved on to brushing
her pink pony, or unicorn rather. Her humming switched over to the bridal
march, indicating that an equine wedding was about to commence. It struck me as
odd that a unicorn would get married, and that I had no idea what gender the
rainbow pony groom was.

“Gabi?
Gabi!
I need to
go look for my mom. I need to get her off that boat and away from those...
those, whatever.” Ghosts? Zombies? I couldn’t bother with semantic choices. My
mom needed me.

“Será, no.” Gabi stood,
abandoned the pony-unicorn wedding, and lifted the cardboard Barbie boat. One
of the sides had collapsed in the fall, rendering it useless.

“But–” I couldn’t let
go. That was it. After all these months of mourning and convincing myself I had
moved on, I still wasn’t ready to let her go.

“Did she tell you how she
died?”

Gabi had an eerie way of
haltingly switching topics, like a stuttering bike chain that you knew would
fall off in seconds.

“What?” I stared dumbly at
the ruined toy box.

“Did your mom tell you how
she died?”

“How she died?” I scratched
my head, wondering if she even knew what cancer was, or how I would explain
what it was. “Well, several years ago, just before I met your dad, she got
really sick with this thing called cancer.”

“No, Será. I mean, how she
died
.”
She handed the Barbie-Mom to me, as if sensing that I would need some part of
Mom to hold, even if it was just this Barbie golem.

My eyes fixated on the
youthful doll, how her eyes sparkled, her hair shimmered, her firm body
enticed.
Mom
was this youthful. She never seemed to age, even as I did.
Her gray hairs only appeared there on the boat, and even then, there were no
other real signs of aging.

“She... she–” She could
have been
my
age.

“It was a really long time
ago, Será. You were
so
little.”

I was. I was really little. I
was not much older than Gabi, come to think of it. I began to remember the
funeral, the consoling relatives, the young Sarah crying all the way through
her mom’s funeral, the lawyers.

“Heinrich and Donnell.
They... they...”

“They were your friends?”

“Well, legal guardians. Yeah,
I guess.” The reality was beginning to overwhelm me. I had to sit back against
the beanbag chair, the one that seemed to swallow me, enveloping me the further
I leaned back. It was like a sick joke, like it wanted you to lean on it, but
only to be consumed.

As I watched Gabi marry the
unicorn to the pony, I realized my mom’s apparent fight with cancer was her way
of saying goodbye to me. She warned me not to enter dark doorways. She wasn’t
afraid of someone or something harming me; she just wanted me to choose life.

“She fought for so many
years, almost two decades.” I was mumbling to myself and the bean bag chair.
“She ran away from those things because she wanted to stay among the living.
She wanted to stay
with
me
.”

“Da-da-da-da...” The bride
marched on, toward her androgynous groom, toward hopes, pains, dreams, fears.
Toward life.

“So all those times she drove
me here, to her dream house, she wasn’t even driving, or was she? Can dead
people drive? And was she showing me how to escape, or was she escaping
herself? She was fighting off–” What? Death? An afterlife? I wasn’t sure.

“Your mom wanted you to see
light.” Gabi paused the wedding long enough to get the words out, then just as
quickly resumed the ceremony. I wasn’t sure who was officiating, but it looked
like some unicorn with a moon on its flank.

“Light...” My voice was
probably only a whisper, absorbed either into the beans of the chair or into my
own thoughts.

Never enter a dark
doorway.
It wasn’t her
warning to stay away from something evil. It was her warning to choose
something better. To live a full life when she couldn’t.

The clicking of the front
door caused me such alarm that I bolted up off the floor in milliseconds, even
with dolls all over me. I had forgotten the broken lock.

“Don’t worry. It’s just Dad
and Michael.”

Looking out Gabi’s window, I
saw Swanson’s car parked in the driveway, a wave of relief sweeping over me.

“Oh good. I thought... I
don’t know what I thought.”

“You’re a good sister, Será.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You decided to stay with me.
You could have stayed with your mom and you chose me instead.” She smiled
widely at me, helping the newlyweds dance at their reception. “Other kids were
afraid of you.”

“What? You mean kids that
pointed at me?”

“Yeah. They saw your mom
following you. It looked scary. But I knew she just missed you. That’s what
it’s like to love someone. It’s hard to let go.”

The end.